/lit/ - Literature

>>17665850
>You use the example of a cloth placed behind a crystal ball, yet this situation implies dvaita, doesn’t it?
No, because in the case of Advaita the cloth is the transient manifestation of Brahman’s maya, it doesn’t subsist as an eternal and equally real principle which is opposed to the Atman-Brahman in a duality, but its eventually sublated so its not dualism.
>A crystal ball is not boundless like you claim the jivatman to be.
The Atma is boundless, the jiva is not
>A crystal ball is finite and differentiated from its surroundings. It is not the same as the cloth or another piece of crystal somewhere else.
The only purpose of the analogy is to illustrate how something can seem to impart its characteristics to something else while that thing itself remains unchanged.
>Wouldn’t the advaita example be more something like a cloth placed inside a swimming pool?
maybe, but I try to stick to the metaphors they use in the literature,
>This one doesn’t jive with your overall sentiment because the water in front of the cloth would be in flux with the water in other areas - so the consciousness associated with one bodily experience would constantly be in flux with other consciousness.
I’m not going to try to defend metaphors which are not even used by Advaita, which which are phrasing things in a way that they would disagree with, I’ll answer if you rephrase your question to just ask about the point you are trying to ask about without shoehorning the point into a metaphor which Im supposed to defend despite me not accepting the metaphor as valid to begin with.
>so the idea of bubbles forming in this infinite unified consciousness doesn’t make sense either.
That’s not how Advaita explains it, although if you want to rephrase your question in a straightforward way and ask again I’ll answer it.
>How can this illusion exist in the infinite ocean of consciousness if there is no form there?
Because it stems from Brahman who is omniscient wielding His own power, He effortlessly projects His power within the infinite span of His own consciousness, this power appears to us as form and matter

>>17655529

>"Lastly, the Buddhistic assumption that the extinction of that consciousness is the highest end of human life, is untenable, for there is no recipient of results. For a person who has got a thorn stuck into him, the relief of the pain caused by it is the result (he seeks); but if he dies, we do not find any recipient of the resulting cessation of pain. Similarly I if consciousness is altogether extinct and there is nobody to reap that benefit, to talk of it as the highest end of human life is meaningless. If that very entity or self, designated by the word 'person' -Consciousness, according to you-whose well-being is meant, is extinct, for whose sake will the highest end be? But those who believe in a self different from consciousness and witnessing many objects, will find it easy to explain all phenomena such as the remembrance of things previously seen and the contact and cessation of pain-the impurity, for instance, being ascribed to contact with extraneous things, and the purification to dissociation from them."

Sri Śaṅkarācārya - Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya 4.3.7.

>>17464989
>https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/StNp/StNp3_12.html
>“Any stress that comes into play is all from consciousness as a requisite condition. With the cessation of consciousness, there is no stress coming into play. Knowing this drawback—that stress comes from consciousness as a requisite condition—with the stilling of consciousness, the monk free from hunger is totally unbound.
>"That is what the Blessed One said. Having said that, the One Well-Gone, the Teacher, said further: “All sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, & ideas that are welcome, appealing, agreeable—as long as they’re said to exist, are supposed by the world together with its devas to be bliss. But when they cease, that’s supposed by them to be stress. The stopping of self-identity is viewed by the noble ones as bliss.

this nihilist drivel was refuted by Sri Śaṅkarācārya

>"Lastly, the Buddhistic assumption that the extinction of that consciousness is the highest end of human life, is untenable, for there is no recipient of results. For a person who has got a thorn stuck into him, the relief of the pain caused by it is the result (he seeks); but if he dies, we do not find any recipient of the resulting cessation of pain. Similarly I if consciousness is altogether extinct and there is nobody to reap that benefit, to talk of it as the highest end of human life is meaningless. If that very entity or self, designated by the word 'person' -Consciousness, according to you-whose well-being is meant, is extinct, for whose sake will the highest end be? But those who believe in a self different from consciousness and witnessing many objects, will find it easy to explain all phenomena such as the remembrance of things previously seen and the contact and cessation of pain-the impurity, for instance, being ascribed to contact with extraneous things, and the purification to dissociation from them."

- Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya 4.3.7.

>>15101674
None of that is true, you are acting schizophrenic my friend, I've been here since 2012 but never read Guenon until 2015 which is when I began posting about him. I can't imagine what caused you to become so upset and paranoid. Maybe you should try studying Advaita Vedanta and similar non-dualism, it can help you overcome those negative emotions and beliefs. Start with the Ashtavakra Gita linked here, >>15101762 it's really good

>>15096205

Śaṅkarācārya laughed and replied "What a silly proposition, In Moksha one enters into one's previously obscured true nature as Brahman Himself and becomes eternal Bliss, it is complete freedom untouched and unaffected by anything, existing as the "One alone, without a second" as the Chandogya Upanishad states, there being nothing else existing, there is no second entity or effect at this stage which can make Brahman unhappy or unsatisfied "

Śaṅkarācārya continued "In fact it is your idea of liberation itself which is nonsensical, you state that Nirvana is bliss, yet at the same time you deny that anything continues which can experience that bliss, if the individual entity does not continue into Nirvana, and if you don't admit any supra-individual entity which does like the Atman, then Nirvana can not be experienced and it is merely a dissolution into nothingness, an extinction. Bliss in such a scenario becomes only a figurative way of describing how annihilating oneself prevents one from experiencing the suffering of life, but it is not Bliss in a literal sense and so it is not true Bliss as the Upanishadic moksha is. You are a Charvaka (materialist) in disguise.

Nagarjuna gasped and replied "b-but Śaṅkarācārya, Nirvana is beyond the extremes of existence and non-existence! It's not nothingness or a complete annihilation!"

Śaṅkarācārya smiled, "Nagarjuna my foolish friend, you yourself have turned Nirvana into complete annihilation an nothingness by your denial of anything that continues into Nirvana which experiences it, if the person, Atma, Jiva, aggregates or any other way of describing a person do not experience Nirvana after death, then it has no connection with the person who is supposed to be attaining it and the only result is the annihilation of their cycle of rebirth and their extinction into nothingness. Also, it does not make any sense to say that Nirvana is beyond existence and non-existent. Something can either exist or it cannot exist, or it can have a transcendental existence beyond all thought and language such as the Upanishadic Brahman, but this later category is still a special category of existence.

>>15010270
>invented the dialectic
the first known usage of dialectic in history is found in the dialogues of the sage Yajnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is usually dated to around 800 BC

>>15008223
>They're not combined, you are simply putting up a false dilemma.
That's not true, if an object exists it can either be instantaneous or non-instantaneous, the latter option including all other variations such as lasting an hour, a day or for eternity. If an object exists then it has to fall under one of these two categories without exception. If you want to allege that there is some special 3rd category which nobody else has ever heard of but which you miraculously know about then you'll have to provide proof for it, simply saying "blah blah false dilemma" is the same as admitting you don't have an argument. The inability of you to explain what quasi-instantaneous is and how this resolves the contradiction I've pointed out is the result of a conceptual failure on your behalf that results from trying to square the circle of the incoherent nature of the doctrine of momentariness.

>An object can last for as long as it takes the next moment to arise, it doesn't have to be instantaneous or 'lasting 1 ns'.
The doctrine of momentariness itself says that objects only last for single moment. If that "lasting long enough" encompasses multiple moments it's no longer momentary, if you don't want to defend momentariness anymore then say so but don't pretend it's something that it's not.

>hen you are arguing that physical induction is the criteria of cause being contained in the effect, which is circular reasoning
I'm not arguing that all causes are contained in their effects, I was pointing out that some obviously are, if we identity "curds" as an effect produced by the cause of milk, insofar as those constituents of the curds already inhered in the effect, it allows us to say to in this case and similars ones that the cause is contained in the effect. I see nothing circular about this.

>It isn't instantaneous
That's wrong according to the sources which I have looked at, for example:

"Its fundamental proposition is that everything passes out of existence as soon as it has originated and in this sense is momentary."

https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/momentariness-buddhist-doctrine-of/v-1

to say that something passes out of existence as soon as it has originated is to say that it is instantaneous